Syndication:

The Jill Stein campaign believes it has received enough contributions to qualify for primary season matching funds. The paperwork will be submitted to the FEC for an official determination. Assuming she does receive the funds, she will be the second Green Party presidential candidate to have qualified; Ralph Nader in 2000 was the first. Nader received $664,151 in primary season matching funds in 2000.

Congratulations to the campaign! I hope that this cycle at least some of Nader’s supporters will now throw their support behind the Greens. I think it will be a very healthy development in American politics if the Greens and Libertarians become established as more permanent than they seem to have been in the past. I think there remains a segment of the voting population that’s essentially just voting for “Perot” every year. In recent elections I think that vote has gone to Nader because he’s been seen as the voice ideologically blind dissent. It so happens that I think he’s also been a better spokesperson for Green issues than the Green Party candidates have been, and so because presidential elections are not ballot allignment years in New York I’ve been voting for him. Now, without yet another new reform-minded party this cycle maybe voters who still want to voice dissent will start looking at the existing parties for areas where they really see someone voicing their views. Of course I suspect that Gary Johnson has already staked his claim as “the” third party candidate of 2012 and so some Nader voters who still simply want to voice dissent will just vote for him regardless of his platform. But hopefully in future elections The Greens, Libertarians, and the Constitution Party will come to embody something similar to what Americans Elect sought to do. They need to start growing their numbers though. It never ceases to amaze me how poll after poll shows that Americans want a third political party and yet don’t just take the step of enrolling in an exisiting third party. I think what people mean when they say they want a third party is that they just want their particular views to be expressed in government and that they would be open to a new political party if that party’s existence somehow meant that everything in politics would just go their way. In a sense they’re lying. As for me. I’ll just keep voting based on my traditional system of elimination wherein I look at the ballot and vote for all the Greens, and in races where there are no Greens I pick the candidate not endorsed by the Democrats or Republicans, accepting or lacking that I vote for a kingmaker party the order of preference being working families, independence, conservative, or other. If there are only the two parties I vote Democrat. If there’s no Democrat….I don’t think I’ve ever been in that situation.

Whatever one thinks about the Greens, this should please everyone whose loyalties lie outside the party duopoly. The FECA, deliberately designed to be a major-party protection act, is more and more being ignored or bypassed by the majors and their candidates because of their unwillingness to subscribe to the expenditure strictures imposed when the candidate opts for the public money. Even on the general election side of the act, which was the glaringly inequitable part, the major party advantage is lost when the major parties’ nominees more and more opt to “go private.” More power to the Greens and any other third party qualifying for funds under an act designed to discriminate against them!

If/when you ever understand that plurality elections combined with single-winner districts will only perpetuate the two-party system due to the mathematics, then you’re always welcomed to join the All Party System (and Independents) team at the 8th USA Parliament!

@6, Elections are not decided in fantasy land on some website. Elections are decided in real life at the ballot box. Last time I checked, plurality voting is the system that is being used. You can either use it or not vote.

She almost definitely will be on the ballot in new jersey along with most other candidates with even half serious campaigns. New Jersey only requires 800 signatures, and there are several relatively strong (for a NJ third party) county chapters.~~~~

Mr. Ogle (6), what is your point? Is it that single-member district plurality election favors two-party systems while PR favors multi-party ones? If so, Maurice Duverger got there 58 years ahead of you and for years political scientists and political activists generally have accepted as fact what has come to be known as Duverger’s Law. But if you saying that, short of being able to pull down single-member and replacing it with PR, third-party activists should not try to find every opportunity to challenge the duopoly and its ballot-access, campaign finance, debate access, and other discriminations, I totally disagree with you.